Blackphone 2 by Silent Circle

Smartphones have become synonymous with selfies, video messaging and YouTube but many of the big brands fail to recognize the importance of one thing – personal security. Blackphone is not a name you are likely to have heard, it seems nowadays if it isn’t jet black or blowing up, the companies that care about your needs and wants fall into the shadows. Silent circle, a Swiss company, have designed their second-generation Blackphone, a phone that promises advanced security measures, deep permissions management and encrypted voice, text, and video chat built in. It’s a phone with privacy at it’s core and it’s a great alternative for those who care about what information gets collected and shared about them.

At the heart of Blackphone’s modified android operating system called SilentOS is the capability to control permissions settings of all your apps, giving you a level of privacy control that is unheard of from the others in the game. Even your communications are encrypted across Silent Circle’s private cloud VPN, better protecting you from wondering eyes. It gets better, the creators of the Blackphone even take security measures to the operational level with what the company calls “spaces”, essentially portioning the android ecosystem off into personal and work sub-spaces each with its own privacy settings, app permission settings and allocation of system storage and it works very well!

A big selling feature that puts this phone ahead of the pack is that Silent OS has the world’s fastest vulnerability management. Critical vulnerabilities are patched within 72 hours of detection or reporting, and updates come directly from Silent Circle, with no carrier delays or waiting periods.

Performance wise, the phone fares as well as any other mid-range device. It was generally snappy in our time using it thanks to the octa-core processor and 3gb of ram. One thing that other reviewers have mentioned is the camera. We would rate it as average to slightly above the pack. It is capable of some decent shots in the right environment but at times we found a lot of noise and graininess in the output, something that can hopefully be fixed in a future software update. Going forward, we would also love to see an Android 7.0 update hit this phone in January 2017 and take advantage of even further advancements in the android ecosystem and security.

If you are serious about privacy and want a very capable smartphone as well, then Silent Circle’s Blackphone 2 is one to have on your Christmas list.

About Darren Zygadlo

Darren Zygadlo is an educator, lead product reviewer, and pop culture gynecologist residing in Toronto, Ontario. Despite being Australian and loving the beach, wrestling crocodiles, and putting another ‘shrimp on the barbie’, above all else, he just loves to write. Founder and creator of www.onecutreviews.com, a company that provides product reviews for consumers on the latest quality brands and products that have come to market. You can also follow him on Twitter: @darrenzygadlo and Instagram: @onecutreviews.

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